Another Point of View
by Cynical Chaos
Summary: The possibility of regret for a choice made long ago.


Another Point of View

by Cynical Chaos

Disclaimer: I do not own Hellsing. That is all.

Author's Notes: In constant rebellion of increasing neurosis and paranoia, this song is a songfic. But rather than have it cheerfully deleted three-point-four seconds after it's posted, listen to Rush's 'Distant Early Warnings' while reading this, if you can. I just had the song in my head when I was reading the ending of _It_ by Stephen King, so those are the people who get my thanks.

This story is about Alucard, since he's the only character I seem to be able to write. Not Alucard the vampire, Alucard the killer, Alucard the master or even Alucard the warlord of Transylvania. This story is about second thoughts reminiscent of past choices. It's about regret and wanting to go back. So I formally dedicate this to all the depressed, neurotic daydreamers who have the capability to desire more than what they have. This is for anyone who's who made a mistake and had the honor to admit it and try and fix it. Here's to the losers of the world, the only ones who can see things for what they are.

_Was it a mistake?_

_Was it a mistake to want revenge?_

_Was it a mistake to want to help my people?_

_How did things go so wrong?_

_So much blood... And I am assured that my revulsion will pass. And it will. This is what scares me the most, not what I have gained in my transformation, but what I have lost, what I will lose. And yet, an even more frightening thought is that I will become accustomed to this loss, that it will become no more than a feeling and a memory. A memory that grows fainter will each new kill. A feeling that will be more easily pushed aside each time it roars into me. A guilt that will never truly fade, but will become a familiar and comfortable burden._

_My familiar has told me the I have only more to gain as I grow older and as my powers increase with each feeding. He has told me that the undead have no feelings, no emotions, that they can know and understand basic urges. Does that make me an animal then? A ravening beast, mindless in rage and insatiable in hunger? Is this all I will feel? For the rest of my days, is all I that I will feel to be nothing more than regret and loss as my body grows weaker in the times between my feedings?_

_I am told that what I have gained will give me the power to defeat those who humiliated me, those who betrayed me. And as I hear these things, it is a whisper in my mind, naught more than the graze of a raven's wing, rage, red as the rubies that adorn my cloak, red as all the blood and fire that will surround me, fills me and I fall away. I fall, and it is into the core of my new body that I fall into, the heart of the beast inside._

_I sought, at the beginning of the siege of my people, of the invasion and despoilment of my country, the ancient ways. I did not turn to God. This is what I find that disturbs me more than my fear of losing what keeps me human: the thought, the _fact_ that when I was most desperate, I turned away from God and all that he stands for and thought only of myself. I did not think to help my country or my people, I thought only of the ways that I could make my father and my brother pay for handing me and my sisters and our mother to the Turks. I thought of the tortures that the Turks used on me and it pleased me to find myself thinking of the terror that I could elicit from them, my former captors could I escape._

_It was in my sorrow at the loss of my pride and my station, the endless circles of my self pity and my relentless selfishness, that the devil came to me. The priests in Wallachia, in their cathedrals and temples and churches, even these babbling heathens that surround me, all speak of the devil as being of dark nightmares, cowled in shadows and lit by hellfire. But he did not come to me in that form. He came to me in forms that would shape me to his will, that I would all the more willingly give myself to him. And give is what I did. Do not let anyone fool you, for the choice is always yours. In the end, it is the human whose soul is given, not the devil's._

_A century after my mistake and my turning, after the decade that I visited horror and pain upon all that crossed me, after the years in which I fed my endless rage with the blood of so many innocents, I learned the name of the creature that visited me in my night. Mephistopheles, Belial, and Asmodeus. The Tempter, the Rager, and the Lustful. Three forms he came to me in, three forms each representing a shade of my desires and thoughts. Thoughts, desires and holes in whatever defense I might have erected. But I did not seek to build anything but a relationship with my tempters. They could bring me power, they who are one which I did not realize until later, and power is all that I desired. Power I received as they, he, gave me what was called 'the ultimate gift.' Vampirism. The greatest power, the greatest perversion, a curse so twisted that not even God himself would look upon me. And I left the realm of the living to cavort with the dead and the lost. In so doing, I threw, cast, hurled myself away from whatever angels of mercy I might have cried out to._

_It has been said that making mistakes is what makes humans human. But one of this magnitude? Is it truly even a mistake? Have I tried to reconcile myself with God? Yes, it is and I have, and my skin was blackened for it. God will have nothing to do with me and I with him, and so we parted, not as I walked from the church, nor even when I turned to Lucifer, the devil, that he might give me the strength to crush those I hated. It instead began when I lost myself in despair, as the Turks raped and tortured and, eventually, killed my sisters and my mother. All for the peace of my father's kingdom. It was then that I made my mistake. It was then that I turned form God rather than to him. Rather than seek whatever comforts and peace his presence might have brought me, I lost myself in my rage. And it is in rage that I continue, for only the cold, white heat of pure rage can dull my memories. The rage against the God who abandoned me, the devil that tempted me, and against the pitiful screams of those who died at my hands. All this, and more, drove me further into the carnal lusts of my new state of being, nestled my soul my firmly, more comfortably into the hands of the devil I had sold it to._

_Power, but at what price?_

Okay, that went well. I know, for those who are more enlightened in the matters of manga and manwha, thatI ended turning Alucard into a sort of Ivan Isaacs. But it fit the story.

Cynic Signing Out


End file.
